Unique epilepsy: Man dozes off at first bite

 

Epilepsy is a treatable brain disorder in which the normal activity of brain’s neurons is disturbed, causing strange sensations, emotions, and behaviour or at times, convulsions, muscle spasms, and loss of consciousness.

This unique sort of epilepsy embeds inside a normal phool-waala (flower seller) of Thane, Mumbai. The 25-year old suffers from ‘eating epilepsy’, in which eating is a precipitating factor for the epileptic fits. He would get 5-7 seizures a day, 70% of them were triggered by eating.

We all feel like relaxing and taking a short nap after lunch, where we could just stretch our body and cuddle to the comforts of our bed. But for Hariom Gupta, sleeping became his nightmare. Everytime he would take a bite of an apple, a sandwich or any other eatable, he would fall, like Sleeping Beauty.

But his sleep – which was not more than few seconds or couple of minutes long – were brain seizures who’s intensity was worsening and frequency increasing.

“The affected area of his brain was located in the left dominant lobe that controls comprehension and expressive speech. The chances of him losing his speech were high” – said KEM Hospital’s neurosurgeon Dr. D Mazumdar who has been taking care and treating Hariom’s case for the past two years now. “I wouldn’t say that the seizures have completely gone, but we have been able to reduce the intensity from 5 times a day, to once in 5 days. And that is a real relief to both me and my client”, she added. Hariom’s condition in 2014 was extremely bad and he had been going around the city looking for treatment. He sought treatments from Hakims to neuropaths across the country but found no cure until he stumbled upon KEM Hospital, where he read, they offered surgery to treat epilepsy. How wondrous our human body is, how small dysfunction can cause unbelievable defects and problems to our body. Hence, Science can never stop learning about variety of unusual happenings in our body system and there is no end to the knowledge of what we comprise of.



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